Base Camp was an underground performance produced by Saye Theatre in cooperation with the young artists of Flaneur Circle, adapted from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed.

The performance was created during the period of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran, when public space, artistic activity, and everyday life were deeply affected by the ongoing protests and the government’s response to them. At the time, many theatre groups suspended their performances in solidarity with the protests and in opposition to the compulsory hijab and the violence surrounding its enforcement.

Base Camp took a different path. The performance was developed and presented without official permission in an abandoned school in southwestern Tehran. Its cast included twelve women and three men, most of them young artists and students who had been directly involved in the social atmosphere of the protests.

The location was deliberately kept outside the official theatre system. There was no theatre venue, no established stage, and no conventional production infrastructure. The group had to build the lighting and performance conditions with whatever materials were available. Information about the performances circulated privately through trusted contacts and Telegram, and a password was used to gain access to the building.

Because of the security situation, the performances could not take place on a fixed schedule. They were presented irregularly and announced only shortly before each performance. The possibility of arrest was a constant part of the situation in which the work was made and presented. The cold weather and snow added another physical difficulty to the performances.

The choice of Cleansed was also significant. Kane’s play deals with violence, control, bodies, desire, and the destruction and reconstruction of human relationships. Rather than treating the text as a direct commentary on current events, the performers worked with its language and situations as material through which their own experience of violence, fear, isolation, and resistance could enter the performance.

For Saye Theatre, Base Camp became part of its ongoing practice of working outside institutional theatre spaces and questioning the conditions under which theatre can be produced and encountered. In this case, the abandoned school became the temporary site of a performance that could not have existed within the normal structures of the theatre system.

The project was developed with the young artists of Flaneur Circle, whose members formed the main body of the performance. Following Base Camp, other independent theatre groups also began experimenting with performances outside conventional venues and without the usual institutional structures.

For Saye Theatre, the project was less about producing a conventional theatre event than about continuing to make theatre under conditions in which performing itself had become a political and physical act.

photos by Houman Mahmoudi